These Are The Secret Love Letters Charles Schulz Sent To A Woman While He Was Married

Charles Schulz, you old dead dog you. The Peanuts creator, whose annual holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas has already aired on ABC, despite their still being 18 days until Christmas (man, I wish someone would call out people for forgetting the true meaning of the holiday), used to send love notes and drawings to a woman 23 years his junior while he was married. And now you can buy Schulz’s scrawled infidelity. Says the AP:

The late “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz was once so infatuated with a [25-year-old] woman he sent her dozens of romantic letters and drawings of his beloved cartoon characters. Many of the themes of that correspondence made it into his daily comic strips at the time.

Now those love notes from 1970-1971 are being offered for sale at Sotheby’s in New York by the family of Tracey Claudius, who the auction house says is ill at her home near Philadelphia. It’s estimated the notes will fetch $250,000 to $350,000 at the Dec. 14 auction.

Claudius met the cartoonist on March 16, 1970, while accompanying a friend on an interview assignment. She ostensibly came along as a photographer but afterward admitted in a letter to Schulz that it was a chance for her to meet her idol and thank him “for all the enjoyment Charlie Brown and that ‘stupid beagle’ provide me.” She was 25. The married Schulz was 48. (Via)

He…he did not seem healthy while writing these. (I Sigh a Lot is such a great name for a mumblecore movie.) According to the Daily Mail, “In one strip to be sold at the auction, Charlie Brown visits Lucy’s psychiatric help stand and asks, ‘Do you think monogamy is possible for humans, given how we’re wired?'” That said, who knew the Peanuts mastermind had such a salty (sorry) personality? What else was Schulz up to in his private life? For the good of the world, I hope it was recording a one-man rock opera called Little Dead-Haired Girl. Much less expected than the groan-inducing It’s the Great Blumpkin, Charlie Brown.